Portal is NOT a website

The portal cluster is a general purpose cluster of servers which is the gateway into the CS Dept. computing environment. Logins are load balanced among the servers. Upon an 'ssh' to portal.cs.virginia.edu, your login will be placed on the least loaded of the cluster's servers (portal[01,02, etc.]). Each system is running Ubuntu Linux and has plenty of memory, CPU cores, and scratch space. Your home directory is automatically mounted and available when you login.

Replace <userid> with your CS userid (which is identical to your UVA Computing ID), and provide your password to 'ssh' into portal.

Temporary passwords are sent via email when your CS account is created initially. After logging in for the first time, you will be required to change your password

~$ ssh <userid>@portal.cs.virginia.edu

Note, for the first time you connect via SSH, you will see the following output

Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)?

Enter yes to continue

Note, that if you are opening a terminal on your Mac or PC, your username on the Mac or PC may be different from your CS domain userid. So be sure to include your CS/UVA userid on the 'ssh' command line.

Application for running this command are Terminal

Applications for running this commands are Command Prompt or PowerShell

For further reading see: (SSH Logins)

Most popular software is already available on portal, so you do not need to install it. See: Software Modules

You can use portal to perform many interactive tasks, like editing files, compiling code, testing code, etc. If you intend to run long, compute intensive programs, you should use other Computing Resources which are available for general login or through the job scheduler (see Scheduling a Job using the SLURM job scheduler).

See Linux Server Access for more information about accessing CS Dept servers.